We don’t believe it’s intended to be malicious, it’s more than likely an errant third-party dev miscoded something causing it to increase the number of calls. It appears the issue started on Saturday 7 Jan at 18:13 UTC, so if you’re a budding developer that was developing something new around that time, it may be worth checking into!
We aren’t looking to punish the individual responsible for the uptick in requests, but if we do discover the individual that may have accidentally caused the issue, they’re welcome to drop me a message. I can pass that along to the development team to see if we can restore the service before the additional work is put into reinforcing the endpoint.